[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Comparing and contrasting Refried Elvis and Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon
This paper compares and contrasts two texts, which are: Refried Elvis by Eric Zolov and Murder at the Sleepy Lagoon by Eduardo Obregon Pagan. Today there is scant commercialized evidence of the counterculture's very existence; little remains for nostalgic recycling. Refried Elvis's book argues that rock music challenged the post-Revolutionary state in Mexico as no other cultural form could, and thus enabled the student movement of the late 1960s to come into existence and even continue after the government massacred hundreds or thousands of demonstrators at the Plaza de Tlatelolco in 1968. Whereas the second novel by Eduardo Obregn Pagan provides the first comprehensive social history of both the trial and the riot and argues that they resulted from a volatile mix of racial and social tensions that had long been simmering.
Zolov describes the biased and enlightening environment against which Mexican youth rebelled in exacting and convincing detail, but some phenomena usually associated with the counterculture in developed nations are discussed only briefly, such as drug use among young Mexicans. In fact, one wonders how accurate a portrait of the Mexican counterculture the Rock music genre can provide. Would a history of Rock in the United States tell the whole story of the American counterculture and political protest movements? Zolov describes Rock as a "mirror" that reflected the concerns of Mexican youth in a rapidly modernization nation. Whether that mirror reflected issues accurately or in a distorted fashion is unclear. Nevertheless, Refried Elvis is an important work. It provides a wealth of detail on the youth movement in Mexico and highlights the myriad ways in which the world's peoples have been growing closer together, how a global popular culture has been emerging, and yet how domestic issues can still shape the nature of social and cultural protest movements. The book is an imperative step in the creation of an international history of "the Sixties" and the worldwide youth upheaval of the Cold War Era.
On the other hand, the second text is an examination of the tarnished 1942 "Sleepy Lagoon" massacre experiment in Los Angeles and the ensuing Zoot Suit insurrection. The writer offers a community narration of both the trial and the riot and argues that they resulted from a explosive mix up of ethnic and social tensions that had long been simmering. In reconstructing the lives of the murder victim and those accused of the crime, Pagan contends that neither the convictions (which were based on little hard evidence) nor the ensuing riot arose simply from anti-Mexican sentiment. He demonstrates instead that a variety of pre-existing stresses, including demographic pressures, anxiety about nascent youth culture....
